So I have a bash script I want to run in php that has arguments but at the moment I cant even get PHP to write to the machine. As a basic test I tried the touch command to no success. I’m new to PHP so any help would be great. I don’t understand whats wrong here. I’ve tried:
<?php
shell_exec('touch /var/www/html/test.txt');
?>
<?php
exec('touch /var/www/html/test.txt');
?>
<?php
system('touch /var/www/html/test.txt');
?>
<?php
passthru('touch /var/www/html/test.txt');
?>
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Answer
Difficult to answer this without more information. But, normally touch should create a new file. The most common reason is lack of permissions.
Normally, webserver runs with user www-data. Check and see if permissions are not set for that user.
You can simply run the command
addgroup www-data
That will error out if www-data has right permissions. Otherwise, things might just start working. Also restart apache after this for safety purposes.
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Alternatively, in the system command add a 2nd variable like this.
system('touch /var/www/html/test.txt', $retval);
$retval will contain the status of the error. Will help you debug.
You can also run a tail on the apache error log like this.
tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log
It should throw errors , if there is a problem.